Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-yet-tweeted dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Twitter Inc. is planning widespread job cuts, to be announced as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company may cut about 8 percent of the workforce, or about 300 people, the same percentage it did last year when co-founder Jack Dorsey took over as chief executive officer, the people said. Planning for the cuts is still fluid and the number could change, they added. The people asked not to be identified talking about private company plans.

Yup, they're really pining for the fjords now.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-25/twitter-said-to-plan-hundreds-more-job-cuts-as-soon-as-this-week


Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:12AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:12AM (#418828)

    The same would have happened if it was bought out.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:40AM (#418834)

    Honestly....

    The whole implementation was rubbish from the start. Yes yes it was used by famous people for PR and made money due to advertising blag blah.

    That is not the measure I am using and nor should people in general.

    Fat chance of that....

    • (Score: 2) by Geotti on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:10AM

      by Geotti (1146) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:10AM (#418845) Journal

      They should transform into a pub-sub-hub... Oh... Wait...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:14AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:14AM (#418847)

      Consider how much worse social media has gotten since the days of MySpace.

      While I'm not a fan of Twitter, I would hope the constant devaluations would get everyone to pull their collective heads out of their ass instead of this slow motion dot.com crash that seems to be social media at large.

      • (Score: 2, Funny) by Sarasani on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:29AM

        by Sarasani (3283) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:29AM (#418857)

        Ah, lovely MySpace. That place where everyone proudly put up their own version of Homer Simpson's homepage [youtube.com].

        Aside from wasting far too much time with some incredibly funny & insightful people on the MyOpera community (why on earth did they delete that?), I never really "got" the whole social media thing. It has mostly past me by and I never really considered that I missed much.

        So Twitter can go the way of the dodo. As far as I'm concerned, they can take all their social media cohorts with them.

        • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:40PM

          by DeathMonkey (1380) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:40PM (#419069) Journal

          I never really "got" the whole social media thing.
           
          Yeah! Posting comments on the internet is stupid!!

          • (Score: 2) by Sarasani on Thursday October 27 2016, @01:25AM

            by Sarasani (3283) on Thursday October 27 2016, @01:25AM (#419234)

            Yes yes, I get the joke, but I don't think one could state that "social media" === "posting comments on the internet"? After all, online commentary had been around for nearly a decade before social media came on the scene.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:20AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:20AM (#418849)

      The twitter ruined a whole generation's writing skill - kids write like blithering idiots now.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:35AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:35AM (#418861)

        #MakeAmericaGreatAgain

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by jmorris on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:57AM

          by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:57AM (#418864)

          #MakeAmericaGreatAgain

          Nope. Too long for Twitter. #MAGA #TRUMP2016 That is how you have to say things in Twitterspeak. Feh. A Tweet is barely bigger than an old skool signature. BBS 72 character style, not the email/usenet three and four line monster .sig junk.

          The whole idea was suspect from the start, same for facebook. Even if useful services the market valuations were purely imaginary numbers transposed to accounting. Seriously, just from the summary we know it is bullcrap. Firing three hundred people is newsworthy only because social media companies are actually so tiny. A couple of thousand people, most just useless filler to conceal just how few people are really needed, a rent payment to a couple of datacenters to co-lo servers and lease payments on said servers. That is it. No way. Just a matter of time before a commoditization took em down. Going full retard certainly sped their decline but math said their valuation was going to drop to something a lot closer to the actual value they provide. Their only asset is the content users give them for for the 'privilege' of being ruthlessly datamined. Somebody will offer the users a better bargain and the fabled 'network effect / first mover advantage' works right up until it doesn't. Ask MySpace how that works. Gab.ai is probably not going to be the only one to join the race to replace them.

          • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:21AM

            by aristarchus (2645) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:21AM (#418889) Journal

            Nope. Too long for Twitter. #MAGA #TRUMP2016 That is how you have to say things in Twitterspeak. Feh.

            Finally, jmorris has some of that wisdom he keeps talking about. But, of course, he is wrong. Sorry to bring it up, but the character limit? First as a thing with taggers: that's right, grafitti. The Graphic Arts of Brevity! How many letters does it take for me to say what I need to say to the world, yo! And how many can I finish before the cops show up. Yes, the origins of Twitter are in the seedy undersides of society, grafitti artists who cannot actually express themselves in more than 144 characters.

      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 26 2016, @12:04PM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @12:04PM (#418940) Journal

        I wouldn't put it on Twitter. The real culprit is SMS. People started using that short form because it was hard to type on the early cell phones. That's where OMG! and BFF and the like came from. Twitter really only adopted that convention. Their real contribution is the hashtag concept.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:58PM

          by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:58PM (#418974)

          Technically their two contributions were making the first IRC to SMS gateway and then slapping a low quality yet usable ultra low learning curve web interface onto IRC.

          When twitter dies or becomes ineffective due to desperate thrashing around for revenue, it can be replaced by commercial silos like slack or for FOSS people some simple IRC servers/networks.

          There are companies where the secret sauce is technical, like spacex. I don't think I can replicate spacex without a couple human-lifetimes of engineers who probably won't work for me because they already for for spacex. Twitter, at least technically, is like an undergrad group project for a couple weeks, or a real professional working alone for a weekend, type of thing, at least technically.

          Whatever secret sauce its got, its not the tech and its not the idea of "IRC for the stinking masses"

          • (Score: 2) by lgw on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:36PM

            by lgw (2836) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:36PM (#419112)

            Scale is harder than you think, but I'd bet Twitter has (far) more engineer-years in operations at scale than their actual software.

            • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:33PM

              by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 26 2016, @09:33PM (#419158)

              But does the scale provide value, either to the users or the bottom line, and why wouldn't sufficiently advanced IRC scale well? Isn't the market kinda saying "no"?

              I'm not just saying toss twitter and load up IRC clients and connect to freenode. You could do some behind the scenes stuff.

              Remember twitter PR claims are only a factor of a thousand larger than freenode actual results. Real (as opposed to PR) is probably only a hundred times bigger. Obviously freenode is not dying of over use either so freenode could tolerate a bit more traffic. I think that 100x scaling factor quite reasonable.

              Its interesting to look at how low the requirements are for freenode and then extrapolate a hundred times larger.

              https://freenode.net/support [freenode.net]

              So 200 gigs ram instead of 2 gigs ram. Or 300 megs/sec of traffic as opposed to 3 megs/sec

              I guess if you limited IRC like twitter does limiting, then traffic would be lower?

              If I made 100 virtual freenode servers (or more likely given current day specs, 10 big virtual servers) and set it all up privately and had a nice looking web/app frontend that collates the 10 or so sharded freenode servers... And of course web front ends can adsorb an infinite quantity of engineer hours depending on how nuts the designers get.

              I'm just saying we're talking a couple orders of magnitude larger than a hobbiest scale project. It would be like if a kids model rocket went 1/100th the way to the moon or launched a mere 50 pounds into geosynch orbit. Its a big step, just not that far of a step.

              Another interesting way to look at 100x scaling factors is a couple years ago when I only had a couple years experience with these computer thingies my dad spent about a car payment on some 4116 16Kilobit dynamic ram chips. Figure I donno $50 each, and he needed eight for 16kilobytes. And this was a good deal as they were kind of exotic technology at the time. So a couple decades later 16 gigabytes of dram is about eighty bucks. So in lets say 20 years thats six orders of magnitude of storage for a quarter the price. So at least with respect to ram storage in about 2020 a raspberry pi is going to ship with enough ram for $30 to run a clone of 2016 twitter. Yeah yeah I know there's CPU and network traffic blah blah whatever. Still the point is you can measure the cost of twitter clone not just in dolllars today but as pennies in upcoming years.

              Another way to look at it is non IRC performance. Doesn't craigslist send 20 million emails a day thru FOSS mailer called haraka or something? I mean high performance networking and traffic isn't a big problem anymore.

              • (Score: 2) by lgw on Friday October 28 2016, @12:54AM

                by lgw (2836) on Friday October 28 2016, @12:54AM (#419666)

                Scale is hard. Every time you add a 0 over what you've done before, you learn a whole new world of lessons.

                Twitter has 100M users to keep track of, about 700 tweets per second, and about 35000 calls per second to its API. 700 tweets per second (will all the fan out to subscribers) takes some heavy lifting, and a good ops team to keep live. 35k tps for the APIs is a mess, even if they're all passthrough to a backend DB. That's a volume where just load balancing the traffic is a specialty.

                That being said, you could build it all on AWS and make ops their problem (DynamoDB won't give you any grief over 100k TPS, and the other plumbing you'd need would scale as well), but it would be pricey. Still, cheaper that way than a couple thousand engineers.

          • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:58PM

            by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:58PM (#419119) Journal

            Twitter, at least technically, is like an undergrad group project for a couple weeks, or a real professional working alone for a weekend, type of thing, at least technically.

            Yeah, that's about right. I built something Twitter-like for the Palm Pilot VII back in the day, and even used hashtags. It didn't take more than a couple days and a little bit of perl. Few people had those devices, though, and nobody knew what social media was so i didn't take it any further.

            --
            Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:18PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:18PM (#419017)

          I don't mean OMG GTFO WTF sorta stuff. I am talking about kids writing streams of English-looking-ish words without a trace of punctuation marks, grammar, or spelling

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:26AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:26AM (#418852)

      Twitter has always been more useful than other social media. Want to find out why your favorite website is experiencing downtime? Check their Twitter. Want to find out what people are saying in real time? Search a phrase or hashtag and check the live results. Want to find a link to an album or other downloads as they come out? It's there. Unlike Zuckbook, you don't need an account to browse Twitter, and if you do make an account it won't be deleted for having a fake name.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:06AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @05:06AM (#418866)

        So its a placeholder for a news feed? Wow...couldn't do that on any other platform....

        And I will say again: A VERY poorly designed one.

        Facebook does better...

        You are mistaking popularity for excellent implementation.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:14AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:14AM (#418887)

          Facebook is just as bad, if not worse, due to the massive privacy violations. If you've used Facebook at any point, you're just a fool.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @08:58AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @08:58AM (#418896)

            Privacy is a completely unrelated topic to this discussion.

            It would be incredibly foolish to mistake this.

        • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday October 26 2016, @10:58AM

          by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday October 26 2016, @10:58AM (#418920) Homepage Journal

          It's a news feed that you can argue on. But you're right, nobody would ever want to argue about the news.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
          • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @11:08AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @11:08AM (#418924)

            But you're right, nobody would ever want to argue about the news.

            I disagree ... and so it begins.

        • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @11:05AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @11:05AM (#418923)

          You are mistaking popularity for excellent implementation.

          Are you talking about Twitter or Windows?